The Last Chapter… or is it?

June 2020 -

After two months of quarantine, we returned to the almost usual routine. It feels nice, although I kinda miss those lazy chill days at home, when we were just making videos, high on sugar and baked cakes all the time.

Now that we can go out and meet friends, we have been doing that, apart from working of course. I will talk about these two things, meeting friends and working, and I will tell you how these two activities are different now. Let’s start from the latter.

Working

Because of the Coronavirus, we now work wearing facemasks and we ask our customers to do the same. It is great to see how nice and collaborative our customers are, requiring us to remind them to wear their mask or wash their hands only occasionally.

We also set as a new rule that only a limited number people should be in the shop at a given time; even this rule is often followed, except for those rare times when it seems that the whole world wants to get into Filantrópia Adománybolt all at once.

What the virus fears

However, the biggest change we introduced is our new donation checking policy. We decided that every bag of donations we receive from our customers must be kept “in quarantine” for at least 2 weeks, before being opened, and its content sold. We are basically treating bags like countries treat people, except that the quarantine facility for our bags is not some fancy hospital or hotel room, but a tiny corner in the back of our shop, where we mercilessly stack all of our waiting-to-be-opened bags.

This is a big problem, because as you can imagine, the huge stack of donations grew quickly, claiming much more than the single corner in the room that we intended, but eating up the whole room instead.

What we fear

So, at the moment, we sort of live among the bags we need to sort. Maybe we will stop accepting donations for a while. I hope we will survive.

Socializing

The second thing I want to talk about is that we are now allowed to go out and meet people, and I’ve been doing it quite a bit, recently.

The reason is that I wanted to build a social circle in Budapest since the beginning of my ESC, but I’ve been postponing it because of laziness. Moreover, who needs a social circle when you already live with such amazing people? But I digress.

Ehm... wanna have a smoke?

In the last month, I’ve been making so many friends and connections that I’m shocked at how actually easy it is. If you are like me, you also feel that going out, talking to strangers and networking is a very energy consuming and quite uncomfortable task. But although this is still true for me, I’ve also learned that as long as you keep an open and non-judgmental attitude towards people, good things “just happen”.

Also, you must resist the temptation of going home earlier than intended because "you're tired" or some other BS your mind tells you to believe.

Smiling with your eyes and listening (not just hearing) to what the person in front of you is saying is a friend-making superpower. Much more powerful than showing how cool you are. Just caring while being You, already makes you the coolest person in town.

So in the end, this has been going on under the sun (the very hot Budapest sun), and I’m quite happy about my experience here as a whole.

I changed so much and so many times that I don’t even remember who I was one year ago and I’m excited about who I will be a year from now.

Just let go and open your heart wide, I keep telling myself.

That is all for now, goodbye dear reader, thank you as always and see you in a month or so, for the real actual last final chapter… or maybe not.

Puszi,

Elia...

Oh, before I go, I'll leave down here some photos I made, I hope you like them :-)

❤️